How the GOP's Homophobia is Hurting It Nationally

As the prior post noted, polls show that a majority of blacks, Hispanics and younger voters support gay marriage and even in Virginia, polls show super majorities of voters supporting employment non-discrimination protections for LGBT citizens.  Yet the GOP, both and at the national level, continues to prostitute itself to the Christofascist elements of the GOP party base - even though doing so is harming the party's competitiveness at a national level.  In 2012, hate group leader Tony Perkins - who virtually personifies anti-gay animus - played a major role in drafting the GOP party platform.  It doesn't get much more homophobic.  A piece in The Daily Beast reviews how the GOP's continued prostitution of itself to the gay haters and professional Christian hate merchants is harming the party's national prospects.  Here are highlights:

Republicans have just founded a new organization to groom minorities in the party. The GOP will never rebound, explains the group’s chairman, African-American former Republican congressman J.C. Watts, “until you get people that look like me in the trenches.”

Republicans probably overestimate the traction they’ll get from changing the color and accents of their pitchmen. There’s something deeply patronizing about the GOP’s assumption that while its voters are motivated by ideology, Latino and black Democrats act merely on ethnic or racial affinity. The harsh truth is that the single biggest reason Latinos and African-Americans vote Democratic is that they mostly agree with Democrats that government should do more for people in need, even if that means less military spending and higher taxes.

[T]he GOP’s new cult of racial and ethnic diversity bespeaks some recognition of the way America has changed. Where the party remains in deep denial is on the question of sexual orientation. For the Republican Party to truly compete in 21st-century America, it’s going to need more than merely black and brown spokespeople. It’s going to need openly gay and lesbian ones, too.

When it comes to accepting lesbians and gays, today’s Republican Party lags decades behind the Democrats. .  .  .  .  In today’s GOP, by contrast, not much has changed since 1977. Gays now serve openly in the Marine Corps, but being a gay or lesbian politician in the GOP still generally requires staying in the closet—at least until you’re outed in some humiliating scandal.

It’s easy to see why the GOP is not searching for openly gay and lesbian spokespeople in the same way it is hungering for black and Hispanic ones. Being a prominent African-American or Latino Republican may be tricky, but it doesn’t require embracing a party that explicitly opposes your right to get married, or to be free from various other forms of discrimination.

The problem is that the GOP’s problems are not just ethnic, they’re generational, too. Since younger Americans of virtually every ethnic and racial group are far more supportive of gay rights than are their elders, stitching together a multi-ethnic coalition against gay rights means building a coalition of the old. Even more important, for many younger Americans, supporting gay equality has become a symbol of modernity, as obvious and uncontroversial as knowing how to use Facebook. As Robert Draper noted in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, when male, 20-something Ohio swing voters were asked to describe the GOP, they volunteered words like “out of touch,” “hateful” and “1950s.” The party’s “brand,” one young Republican pollster told Draper, is “that we’re not in the 21st century.”

To overcome this generational disconnect, Republicans need to embrace gay marriage now rather than continuing to play catch-up as it becomes a fait accompli in more and more of the country. And they need to seek out gay and lesbian politicians who can personify the GOP’s new pro-gay rights stance.

To embrace gay rights, Republicans don’t need to abandon cultural conservatism. To the contrary, an unthinking, bigoted opposition to gay equality is preventing Republicans from fashioning a more meaningful culturally conservative message for today’s age. The real threats to traditional values in America today don’t come from committed, monogamous gays and lesbians.

Eventually, the Republican Party is likely to move in this direction, irrespective of the conflict it causes with the party’s Christian evangelical base. The sooner it does so, the faster it will make itself nationally competitive again.

The piece is, in my opinion, on point.  Unfortunately, I do not see the GOP changing given the way in which the Christofascists have taken over the GOP grass roots.  Added to the mix is that gay bashing is a prime money raising part of the professional Christian propaganda machine.  If the gay bogey man goes away, many of the Christofascist hate merchants might have to get real jobs.